A golden mouth against corruption

Q: Which saint had (at least) four skulls?¹
A: John Chrysostom - just ask a Russian, a Greek and two Italian churches who all claim to have it. :)

St. John Chrysostom, whose feast day it is tomorrow, is actually one of my favorite saints and I'm sure he won't hold this joke against me. He is one of those saints – like Saint Pope Gregory the Great, whose thought had a wide-reaching influence on the Church during their lifetime and, even more impressively, still continues to have today (just note the 18 sections of the 1992 Catechism that cite him).

St. John’s epithet, Χρυσόστομος (Chrysostom) means “golden mouthed,” and if you start reading his many homilies and treatises you will soon appreciate his obvious rhetorical gift. The Church is fortunate to have had him on her side and to have had Jesus’ teaching so clearly, elegantly and effectively applied to his day. Take a look at the following quote on poverty and Church property (which applies today just as it did in the 4th century AD) and I hope you will agree with me:

“Do you wish to honour the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad. He who said: "This is my body" is the same who said: "You saw me hungry and you gave me no food", and "Whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did also to me"... What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is dying of hunger? Start by satisfying his hunger and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well.”

(Evangelium S. Matthaei, hom 50:3-4; Cited by Blessed Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, footnote 34.)

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¹ Multi-skulled saints cannot be mentioned without telling a joke by an Irish relative of mine:

A rogue relic dealer kept selling skulls, claiming to be St. Oliver Plunkett’s, until one day a customer said to them: “This can’t be St. Oliver’s skull. I am a doctor and can tell you that this is the skull of a child and St. Oliver died in his fifties!” The dealer, thinking on their feet, retorted: “Well, of course it is a child’s skull. It is St. Oliver’s skull when he was a child!” :)

Beauty, ugliness and art

“Ugliness will redeemed us” was certainly among the most provocative and profound insights shared at a conference of Christian academics and artists that I attended some 12 years ago in Rome. This statement, by the French painter Michel Pochet, was made very much in earnest and at a moment of reflection on a sacred text that spoke about Jesus’ suffering on the cross and his cry of abandonment before his death (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mathew 27:45). It certainly was not a frivolous, Oscar Wilde-esque quip, yet the reaction to it was one of disbelief, shock and immediate, widespread opposition. A very prominent Italian sculptress asked to be given the floor and launched into what was effectively a plea for reason to return: “How can you say that ugliness will redeem us? God is beauty and it will be by beauty that salvation will be delivered!” Personally, I was very much attracted to Pochet’s words and equally disappointed by the immediate opposition they received. Thankfully, the conference chair swiftly rebuked Pochet’s critic, with something along the following lines: He said that the sculptress’ words were not in the spirit of charity, reminded her that we must believe in the good intentions of others and that if their views differ from ours, we must try to understand why they are different. In the end what she said was true but so was that which she criticized, in its own context. The most impressive thing to my mind was not only Pochet’s insight, but also that this group of distinguished academics and artists was both capable of open disagreement and of accepting a rebuke that in many contexts would have lead to offense.

But, let us return to Pochet’s insight, which has immediately attracted me, for which I could see good reason, but which I never had the opportunity to know more about, until I read the transcript of a talk (in Italian) that he gave at an event in 2006. There he talks about his experience of returning to painting after many years and being in post-war Croatia with some friends. Materials were scarce and when his friends realized that he was painting again, they were looking for supplies for him. One day he was given a piece of canvas that was badly marked, torn, discolored and generally not in a fit state to be used as the basis for a painting. Since it was offered to him out of love by his friends, he could not refuse it. Examining the canvas, the thought came to him to paint a portrait of Jesus in his abandonment on the cross, since there he too suffered from the damage that this canvas presented.

Upon completing the painting (shown at the top of this post), Pochet realized that what he did was not so much a portrait of the abandoned Jesus but of the risen one, bearing the marks of his crucifixion and suffering. Looking at his own work, Pochet understood that this dual portrait of the suffering and risen Jesus provides an insight into what beauty is. He realized that Jesus, being God, is also perfect beauty and that his person is substitutable with that of Beauty in the Gospel:¹

“[Beauty] seems dead, buried under the rock of ugliness. But on the third day the tomb is empty. Someone tells us that she is risen and that she waits for us. She walks with us, talks to us. My heart burns in my chest. It is getting late. We ask her to stay for supper, but our eyes open in the moment she disappears. Risen Beauty does not appear again: she disappears, hides in the anonymity of whomever, in the banal, the everyday. […]

Beauty is at the lake’s shore, unrecognizable. A pure eye intuits her and opens our eyes. We dive into the water and Beauty nurtures our mind and our senses, with bread baked on a hot stone. Beauty climbs a mountain with us, is lifted up high before our eyes and a cloud removes her out of sight.

And while we are staring at the heavens as she leaves: “Why are you looking at the sky? This Beauty, which has been among you and has been taken up to heaven, will return one day in the same way in which you have seen her leave.” And we, along the ways of the world, remember her words of farewell: I am with you all the days, until the end of the present age. […]

[T]he death of Beauty, “ugliness” - if we want to call it that, [is] assumed by God, divinized, in the risen Jesus.”

This fits perfectly with the intuition I had when first hearing him speak about ugliness, although the profound insight that Jesus’ life can be applied to Beauty, to gain a deeper understanding of it, is an impressive bonus! Beauty, understood through the optics of Jesus, is not superficial, ‘kitsch’ or only concerned with aesthetics, but one that goes to the heart of what it is to be human. It embraces the ugliness of suffering and uses it to arrive at love and joy.

What Pope Benedict XVI has to say on the subject is very much related. E.g., when talking about Michelangelo's “The Last Judgement” fresco in the Sistine Chapel, he says that it “issues a strong prophetic cry against evil, against every form of injustice” and goes on the exult beauty as follows:

“[T]he experience of beauty, beauty that is authentic, not merely transient or artificial, is by no means a supplementary or secondary factor in our search for meaning and happiness; the experience of beauty does not remove us from reality, on the contrary, it leads to a direct encounter with the daily reality of our lives, liberating it from darkness, transfiguring it, making it radiant and beautiful.

Indeed, an essential function of genuine beauty, as emphasized by Plato, is that it gives man a healthy "shock", it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum -- it even makes him suffer, piercing him like a dart, but in so doing it "reawakens" him, opening afresh the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft.”

He then quotes Simone Weil, saying: "In all that awakens within us the pure and authentic sentiment of beauty, there, truly, is the presence of God. There is a kind of incarnation of God in the world, of which beauty is the sign. Beauty is the experimental proof that incarnation is possible. For this reason all art of the first order is, by its nature, religious."

I hope that you won’t see this as an attempted land-grab for all art in the name of religion. Instead, I believe, it is an acknowledgement of art expressing a fundamental attribute of God, which believers can seek regardless of whether the artist intended it, agrees with it or believes in it. With the profound understanding of beauty (including a “risen” ugliness) that both Pope Benedict XVI and Michel Pochet talk about, we can further seek to recognize the presence of beauty also in art (and life!) that at first sight appears ugly.

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¹ Apologies for this unpolished translation - it is mine and was done in a hurry :$

2012 Year of Faith directory

Since I keep wondering who else is trying to participate in the upcoming Year of Faith by means of blogging, I would like to start compiling a directory both of official and personal blogs and other internet resources relevant to this event. Needless to say, I am in no way endorsing these, but am merely trying to get a sense of what is out there.

Official websites/blogs

• The Vatican’s Year of Faith website (by the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization).
• The US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ YoF pages.
• The Catholic Truth Society’s YoF resource page.
• Diocese of Leeds.
• Maryvale Institute.
• Catholic Community of Fleet and Church Crookham.
• Diocese of Portsmouth (with links to their YoF Facebook and Twitter accounts).
• Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
• Archdiocese of New York.
• Diocese of Hamilton.
• Diocese of Harrisburg.
• Archdiocese of Southwark.
• Kildare and Leighlin Diocese.
• Scottish Catholic Education Service.

Personal websites/blogs

• Adrian Sharp.
• CatholicCulture.org.
• Catholic Dads HQ.
• Thomas J. Neal and Peter Bond.
• Philippine Year of Faith.
• Celebrating the Year of Faith.

If you are writing a blog on this topic or know of other relevant links, please, let me know in the comments and I'll add them to the list.

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To all my regular readers, apologies for this logistical interlude - it's a one-off, but as I couldn’t find a directory like this anywhere, I thought I’d set one up. End of caveat.

WWJD

Neither WWDC, nor WWJZD, but WWJD - “What would Jesus do?” A question that, in this specific form, originates in the writings of the US evangelical pastor Charles Sheldon, that has regained currency in the 1990s with evangelical youth groups and that has even been adopted by parts of the current Occupy movement (e.g., including protesters camped outside London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral).

It is not without critics though, such as the US evangelical and academic Dr. Conrad Gempf, who has the following to say:

“[The Early Church] didn't copy Jesus. [...] They didn't walk on water. Jesus didn’t tell us to do what he did, he told us to do even greater things.”

To my surprise even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, whom I greatly admire, has some things to say against WWJD:

“The Jesus we meet in the Bible is somebody who constantly asks awkward questions [...] rather than just giving us a model of perfect behaviour.”

Instead of getting het up about the above, it is worth realising that the point of the criticisms is not about being against imitating Jesus (Dr. Williams starts his talk by saying “Well, an archbishop is hardly going to suggest that it isn’t a good question to ask!”). It is all about a well-founded concern regarding the dangers of oversimplification (maybe tinged also with a pinch of cynicism - that I too share - regarding the wearing of the now-popular WWJD bracelets). Simply mimicking Jesus’ actions verbatim, taken out of context and without the benefit of either an attempt to develop a relationship with him or of learning from how his followers have imitated him over the centuries, runs the risk of going off course.

Even if naive extremes, like attempting to walk on water, taking up carpentry or growing a beard are left to one side, there is still plenty of room for error, just like there would be with mindlessly applying the Golden Rule (“What do you mean? I would like it if you made me watch football!”). Dr. Williams comes to the following conclusion in his criticism of a headless use of WWJD:

“First, what changes things isn’t a formula for getting the right answer but a willingness to stop and let yourself be challenged right to the roots of your being. And second, we can find the courage to let this happen because we are let into the secret that we are in the hands of love, committed, unshakeable love.”

To me this doesn't sound like he is challenging WWJD at all - he is merely highlighting two important aspects of it. WWJD? He would want to get to the root of things (“The truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)) and away from the formulaic. WWJD? He would place his trust in his Father, who is love (For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16)).

It is also worth noting that the idea of following the example Jesus set is fundamental to Christianity and has been a core part of it since day one. Jesus called the apostles to follow him (“Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Mark 1:17)), he called all to embrace their sufferings and follow him (“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24)) and his call has been heard by every generation of his followers (e.g., look at St. Augustine and St. Francis, who deeply believed in an imitation of Jesus, and at Thomas à Kempis’ book even entitled The Imitation of Christ).

Personally, asking myself the question of what Jesus would do is something I have been encouraged to practice since my childhood and is something that I see as an effective guide also for my sons. Even to a four-year-old the answer is obvious when the question is asked in a situation where they have to make a choice. Focusing on Jesus in a decision making moment helps to introduce the selfless, altruistic and loving into a context that may otherwise be steered to an excessive focus on oneself or on following conventions. And even when at times I cannot answer the question unequivocally, placing myself in front of Jesus is of value in and of itself.

Catholics in a water park

This is not the sequel to Snakes on a Plane, but if you read various “Catholic” blogs, you could think that holding a youth day in a water park (and having mass during its course) was to Catholicism what Snakes on a Plane is to cinema. Before proceeding to the outburst in these blogs, let’s just take a quick look at the event’s announcement by the Diocese of Honolulu, which, apart from organizational details about the event that took place a week ago, includes the following quote from Pope Benedict XVI:

“Joy is at the heart of the Christian experience. [W]e experience immense joy, the joy of communion, the joy of being Christian, the joy of faith [… and w]e can see the great attraction that joy exercises. In a world of sorrow and anxiety, joy is an important witness to the beauty and reliability of the Christian faith.”

The theme of the year is then stated as “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4) – i.e., the same theme as that of this year’s World Youth Day - and a key part of the program is a mass presided over by Larry Silva, the Bishop of Honolulu. And it is precisely this that so incensed my (at least by name) fellow Catholics.

I don't want to pollute your mind too much, so let me just pick out a couple of choice cuts from among the dissenting blogs:

“Does it strike anyone else that “joy” is being confused with “frivolity” or “fun” in this case? Second, how exactly does spending a fun day at the water park “better equip” the youth for their “witness to Jesus”? And third, are the youth really going to be reflecting on the presence of God in their daily lives at this event? I have nothing against the kids (or the adults, for that matter) enjoying a day of fun at a water park, but let’s just call it what it is and not pretend it’s something else. And let’s not mix the sacred with the profane.” (Philothea on Phire)

“First, it could be argued that the location planned for Mass is a demeaning venue and contrary to the dignity due to the Blessed Sacrament. The focus of the surrounding environment of a water park screams personal fun and self-gratification rather than personal sacrifice and the selfless sacrifice of our Lord and Savior made present at the holy Sacrifice of the Mass with the real presence of His body and blood.” (Unam Sanctam Catholicam)

“I'm not sure I've ever noticed people doing much reflection at a water park. I have no idea how wading pools, slides, etc. contribute to a renewal of faith.” (Popin' aint easy)

I'll spare you all the other nonsense, including copious references to Canon Law and to the General Instructions of the Roman Missal (i.e., the mass manual), as the above should be plenty to last anyone for a good while. Fundamentally they boil down to an attempt to justify the underlying, grave misunderstanding shared by all of the three blogs mentioned above. Namely, that one’s Christian faith applies to some aspects of life - “the sacred” (self-sacrifice, reflection, selflessness, “witnessing to Jesus”) but not to others - “the profane” (fun, leisure, “enjoying a day at a water park,” “wading pools, slides, etc.”). In other words, we can be good Christians in church and when doing “spiritual” things, but everyday life is another, separate matter.

Such schizophrenic compartmentalization of life is, in fact one of the worst mistakes that the follower of any religion can make and that will ultimately either lead to psychological damage or to a very hollow, superficial religiosity that so many now rightly reject. What is the point of going to church if that is a self-contained, separate activity, unrelated to the real challenges and joys of life? It certainly wouldn't be for the music …

Just to make it crystal clear that such dualism is not Christian, bear with me during this paragraph. Jesus himself says: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12), not “I'll turn the lights on while you are at church, but you are on your own in the water park.” In fact, the whole underlying idea that there is a separation between God and non-God and the heresies that follow from it - starting with Docetism (that Jesus was just a spirit and therefore separate from the material world) and then spreading through various forms of Gnosticism (that the world was created by an imperfect/evil being and that there is a struggle between it and God) – were among the chief issues fought by the Church, starting with St. Irenaeus (my namesake) in the second century AD. St. Augustine puts it very well, as follows: “How is it, then, that I seek you, Lord? Since in seeking you, my God, I seek a happy life, let me seek you so that my soul may live, for my body draws life from my soul and my soul draws life from you” (Confessions 10:20) and St. John, in his first letter, then goes to the root: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16) Jesus asks us to follow him body and soul, weekdays and weekends, in secular contexts and religious ones and both when working and resting.

Finally, just in case you were wondering what sacrilegious frivolities and self-gratification I am trying to cover up with this post, here are two photos from last Sunday’s youth day at the Honolulu water park (taken from their Facebook page):



Since the blogs I am arguing against here have all asked their readers to write to the Diocese of Honolulu to voice disagreement with their Youth Day, I would like to ask you to join me in writing to the Diocese of Honolulu (info@rcchawaii.org) and/or to their Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministry (hawaiicathyyam@rcchawaii.org) to share with them your appreciation for their good work, if you are that way inclined.

UPDATE: A reader has just shared with me the following email, received in response to their message of support sent to the Diocese of Honolulu:

Thank you very much for your note of support, which my staff and I appreciate very much. I wish our critics could have seen how reverent the young people were at the Mass, especially when they spontaneously knelt in the grass for the Eucharistic Prayer.

God bless you!

+ Larry Silva
Most Reverend Clarence (Larry) Silva
Bishop of Honolulu

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Just FYI, here is the message I sent: “Dearest representatives of the Youth and Young Adult Ministry of the Diocese of Honolulu, since I have come across several blogs asking their readers to voice their disagreement with your Diocesan Youth Day held at a water park in Kapolei, Oahu on 1 September 2012, I would just like to express my gratitude to you for bringing Jesus to your youth and assure you of my support and prayers.”

Happy Birthday, Maryām!

Tomorrow is the feast of Mary’s nativity - her birthday :) and, to be honest, it hasn't meant a whole lot to me up until now. I greatly appreciated the feasts of Mary's being mother of God (that opens the calendar year), of her sorrows, of her assumption into heaven (which coincides with my parents’ wedding anniversary and my younger son’s birth), of the annunciation and of her immaculate conception, but her birthday just seemed a bit of an add-on.

Trying to understand the significance of this feast, which is only one of three birthdays the Church celebrates (the others being those of John the Baptist and Jesus), I started looking at what has been said about it so far, and I have to say that most homilies that I came across were rather disappointing. Not necessarily as such, but with regard to shedding light on celebrating Mary’s birthday, rather than other aspects of her life.

Then I found this gem:

“The present Feast is for us the beginning of feasts. Serving as boundary to the law and to prototypes, at the same time it serves as a doorway to grace and truth. “For Christ is the end of the law” (Romans 10:4), Who, having freed us from the letter (of the law), raises us to spirit.” (St. Andrew of Crete, sermon on the Nativity of the Theotokos)

Wow! Reading this was a real ‘eureka’ moment for me as it does squarely hit the nail on its head. Mary’s birth can be seen as the start of Christianity, which becomes flesh in her some years later. It is the beginning of a new way, the breaking of prototypes, the transition from rules to life. I warmly recommend the whole sermon, which opens with the above lines and which, in its joyous tone, is a great fit for tomorrow’s celebration.

Marriage and the family

I am married and am immensely grateful for being part of several families: the family I was born into (since, even though I am a first child, my parents were a family already before I was born or even conceived), multiple extended families, and the family my spouse and I form with our children. And that’s only as far as biological ties go. I am also a member of the Church - the family of Jesus and (some of) his followers. In many ways I also consider the relationship I have with close friends to be like that with brothers, sisters or parents and I strive to extend this circle whenever and with whomever possible.

What is it that is so special about the family? I believe it is the fact that it mimics the relationships of the persons of the Trinity, where each loves the others without limits and with complete self-noughting,¹ to the extent that the three become one. In my families I have often experienced love that is selfless, self-sacrificing, generous, gratuitous and unconditional and that invokes Jesus’s promise: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew, 18:20). This love makes the family a place of peace, trust, safety, stability, openness, growth and joy and a place where I can most fully be myself. I can rely on the support and love of other family members and also on their desiring only the best for me. I don't have to look out for myself, as it is the others who look out for me and I can instead focus on them and on others. My families have also been safe havens that have protected me from state-organized oppression, from the negative influence of others, from erroneous tendencies of my own and that have also looked after me in illness, bad moods, uncertainty and fatigue.

Is this to say that there are no challenges with living in a family? Certainly not, since even though the model is perfect, its instances are often not, even to the point of breaking. Does that make the model any less worthy of following? I don't think so, since even when not lived to perfection, the ideal of the family provides a clear direction of what to aim for.

For me, as a Christian (and for others too), the foundation of a family - its birth, is in marriage, where the spouses each make an indissoluble gift of themselves to one another, which they do in front of God and which they aim to sustain with His help and in His presence. The day I got married was one of the sacred, lived in great simplicity (I remember polishing shoes in the morning and sending a couple of emails to close friends who couldn't be with us and being filled with great joy and a delicious lightness of being,² not even to mention the rest of the day that you would expect to be joyous). The years that then followed and persist into the present have been filled both with everything I said about the ideal of the family and with challenges, trials, difficulties and suffering. To me, as a Christian, these too are very much part of being married and of living in a family, just like they were very much part of Jesus’ life. They are always an opportunity to recognize Jesus’ presence and to start again to seek forgiveness, forgive and love and I am deeply grateful to God for my spouse, children, parents, siblings and all with whom I have family-like relationships.

There would be a lot more to say, but I believe I managed to give an idea of why marriage and the family matter to me. This reflection was very directly motivated by many recent pronouncements by different representatives of the Church who have spent paragraphs upon paragraphs talking about what threatens the family and how it needs to be opposed and which have always left me wondering: ‘But what is it about the family that you see worth protecting? How do you see the things you oppose as threatening? [beyond stating them as such] And what positive proposal can you make as an alternative to the ones you oppose?’ I am not saying that opposition alone isn’t worthwhile, but it is very much a level zero approach and I was certainly hoping for more. The closest I have seen to an acknowledgement of this trend is a statement made two days ago by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin:

“The Church’s social doctrine must always be animated with charity and must be accompanied by charity and will only really be understood through the lens of charity. When the Church’s organizations simply become lobbying bodies alongside other lobby organizations or social commentators alongside other social commentators then they loose their real originality and therefore their original contribution to the debate about the formation of society.”

This is exactly what I have been looking to hear from many others and I hope that Archbishop Martin will follow up this call to a focus on love and apply it to the various issues being so hotly debated these days.

Lest I be misunderstood in a way that is most repulsive to me, let me be explicit about one thing: I believe there is the potential for good in all human relationships, regardless of who their protagonists are or what their status is. What I have said about the family and about marriage was in no way meant as suggesting that the things which I value about it cannot also take place under other circumstances. In no way do I mean to suggest that the family built on marriage has a monopoly on all the good that it is capable of. Compassion, commitment, selflessness, caring, support and love are the potential of any human relationship and my seeking them in the context of my family, and the marriage it is built on, is in no way a declaration of inferiority or inadequacy with respect to other forms of life.

Finally, I do see a big challenge that the Church (i.e., me too!) faces, which is to find a way for all, who want to, to participate in its life. Cardinal Martini in his last interview gave a clear example: “A woman is abandoned by her husband and finds a new companion who is concerned for her and her three children. The second love succeeds. If this family is discriminated against, not only the woman, but her children, too, will be cut off.” Cardinal Woelki said that he tries to “acknowledge that [homosexuals] take responsibility for each other on a permanent basis, have promised each other faithfulness and want to look after each other, even though [he] cannot endorse their life choices.” And there are many others like them! What is very positive in my eyes is that there are representatives of the Church, who feel the presence of gaps that ought not be there and even though I don't see how the gaps will be closed (without throwing the baby out with the bathwater either), I trust God will help us find a way to make everyone feel welcome in His Church.

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¹ Thanks to my bestie, CS, for coining this term, which I believe expresses the extent of the love the Persons of the Trinity have for one another spot on.
² The antithesis of its unbearable variant, so beautifully described by Kundera though.